THE A N[WYOru E _ I.. / '/ -;;- fl. . iL'fiiI I. ..,= /í ' /II" .. .. .11 II /' .... ------ ::... :: I1Q / \ \ \ JÞ.rø J \ '\ ' Oç · ...0 . -- ." o . ". I'. THE TALK. OF THE TOWN $11" J ,'''"\ t ' 4't:t 1 11 .{(I.,þr... '... j 1 #' , If " / }TJ ' -(,,, "1" .\ ...... ..' 1';- ... .,,.& , í. '1S. þ I, . f'.? :r: >;_ j'.1 , --:/' 'I ...,. .. t ,1 J #- .., . · :'} J . r ., 'i: t *-. vI ." <'}>t r" 1. -"t" è I I:M ,., I!! 1.,. ". Z - ';;.,. "'\;, III ð r " 4-..... r l " / '$ .0<- W R.ELUCTANT DÉßUTANTE T HERE has been little in Russell Baker's writing to indicate an interest in television, let alone any sort of affection for it, but last week he said, "In America, if you're not on television, somehow you're not an American. And, like all Americans, I want to be on television." It was "to sat- isfy this lust" that, at the age of sixty- seven, and after forty-five years of confinement to the printed page, he had agreed to replace Alistair Cooke as the permanent host of "Masterpiece The- atre." The job is not, on the face of it, an important or demanding one. The host is required to do little more than adopt a cultivated air and dignify each new British miniseries on PBS with a grace- ful explanatory introduction, but Mr. Cooke's triumphant twenty-two-year incumbency made the Job one of the most respected in the medium. In Janu- ary, Rebecca Eaton, the executive pro- ducer of the series, described the posi- tion as "a burnished golden job," and said that since last July, when Mr. r V) 0.::: W o Z <( '- Cooke decided to retire, as many as six hundred people had applied to succeed him. It took WGBH, the Boston sta- tion that puts together "Masterpiece Theatre" for PB S, several months to ar- rive at the conclusion that Mr. Baker was its man. He will begin his new job in October. The announcement was made at a news conference last Tuesday at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. Mr. Baker, paying in advance the price of televi- sion fame, came up to New York from Florida, where he was on vacation, to answer journalists' questions. This he did with charming self-deprecation. He had not wanted to be Alistair Cooke's successor, he said, but, rather, "to be the man who succeeded the man who suc- ceeded Alistair Cooke." However, on the insistence of his daughter Kasia ("She said I needed to do something to refresh my spirit"), he had agreed to ac- cept the job without an interregnum. But he was still worried He was worried about writing introductions of only four hundred words ("I can barely clear my throat in four hundred words"); he was ):$ " w worried about his lack of television expe- rience ("I have only made three-minute belch-and-burp appearances on morn- ing television, to sell my books"); he was worried above all about what would happen to his hair ("I've always cut my own hair My greatest fear is that I will be sent to a hair stylist") Mr. Baker's hair is not smooth and silky, like Mr. Cooke's, but it is almost as silvery and, in its unruliness, certainly more British -looking. As an interpreter of British culture to an American audi- ence, Mr. Baker can also claim the qualification of having lived in Britain more recently than his predecessor, for Mr. Cooke, although he is of British birth, has lived in the United States since the thirties, whereas Mr. Baker was the London correspondent of the Baltimore Sun in the early fifties, when he covered the coronation of Qyeen Elizabeth II and wrote a weekly feature for his American readers called 'Win- dow on Fleet Street." When a reporter suggested that his Times column re- vealed him as quintessentially American, and therefore perhaps ill-suited to step into Mr. Cooke's shoes, he replied, "I demur from the suggestion that I'm a quintessential American-a quintessen- tial Wasp, perhaps." In a Times column in January, mocking the jargon of the age, Mr. Baker defined himself in greater detaIl as "a genderly enlightened, Celt-sensitive, politically unpredictable, comparatively financially disadvantaged, square, married, heterosexual, comb- carrying, college-educated, hearing- im paired, Depression -generatIon, male E Am ." uropean - erican. While discretion about the hundreds of other candidates for the job has been